Head Of Anti-Sotomayor Group: Hispanic Voters “Think Just Like Everyone Else…Not Like African Americans”
Manuel Miranda, the controversial leader of conservative groups allied against Sonia Sotomayor, said on a blogger conference call that African American voters are different from Hispanic voters because Hispanics “think just like everyone else” on issues, “unlike African Americans.”
Miranda, you’ll recall, is the fellow who’s organizing a campaign to pressure the GOP Senate leadership into filibustering Sotomayor. As I noted below, Miranda had to resign as a GOP Senate staffer after getting nailed hacking into the computers of Senate Dems and swiping their strategy memos.
Today, Miranda did a conference call with conservative bloggers organized by the Heritage foundation, where he discussed Sotomayor. Asked how Republicans could oppose her while avoiding charges of racism, Miranda said they had to wage substantive attacks. Then he segued into a discussion of the views of Hispanics on issues, saying:
“By the way, Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African Americans. We think just like everybody else.”
The audio is here; the key bit starts at around the 42 minute mark.
To be clear, Miranda didn’t appear to be saying that African Americans are unlike everyone else in that they don’t think. He seemed to be saying that everyone, including Hispanics, thinks one way on issues, and African Americans think another way. Perhaps Miranda meant otherwise, but this seems clumsy or wacky at best and seems to crudely isolate African Americans as a political group.
Miranda’s group is putting severe pressure on GOPers to follow his conservative coalition on Sotomayor, though you have to wonder whether they’ll follow his lead if this is what he really thinks.
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So classy. It’s good to know race has nothing to do with anything in American politics. How much farther can the GOP really want to push us back?
What a D I C K
Hmm. Do we maybe need a better quality conservative than we’ve been getting? What exactly are the job requirements for these people?
I started to comment on this because at first I was outraged that this fella would think that we black folk think differently than “everybody else”, but then the scientist in me kicked in. We obviously DO think differently than most everybody else, at least when it comes to politics. No only do we vote heavily Democratic, it is usually a near unanimous vote. Rich or poor, college educated or high school drop out, gay or straight, religious or non-religious, we vote for the left-of-center Party. Why is that? I’ve never heard a good explanation for it, and college studies in political science and sociology never elucidated good reasons, so I am gonna “Bush it” and go with my gut: we as a people have better BS meters, and the Republicans are just brimming full of BS. Their lies make no sense, they contradict themselves constantly, and their leaders are always rich, old, white a-holes.
It seems we aren’t thinking so differently from everyone else now; lots of other people can feel their BS meters hit the red zone now too when they see or hear these dbags.
William C is correct. Our BS detectors never falter, in part, because so many of us remain acutely aware of the past, which as Faulkner pointed out is never past, and, in addition, we don’t allow our relative success as individuals blind us to the realities of how many people, not just African Americans, have to struggle on a daily basis to survive in America.
I will tell you, I really struggled to parse that statement. There aren’t a lot of good ways of reading it.
PT nails it, Greg. A big part of the right’s problem is that they have no concept of the past as they seem to be always caught up in the current new cycle, so that they spew differing messages day after day and keep their winged monkeys flying behind Boss Limbaugh’s broom all day every day and anyone with even a passing interest in politics is laughing at the dissonance.
I was floored by the WaPo piece a few weeks back about how much it sucks to be the working poor and how depressing and expensive it is to be poverty-stricken. I am a middle-class guy now, with a house, a dog, who drinks too much and shops too much, but I also remember living the street life. I’ll never forget it, and now that I work in the charitable world, I think I more clearly understand how the Southern Strategy is going to come back to bite the R’s in the arse. They’ve spent so many years pitting the same class/different ethnic groups against each other that it’s the only game in town for them, and they don’t completely see yet how the internet has totally changed the game. This Satomayor thing is going to end up doing to Hispanics what their demonization of MLK and Malcolm X did to blacks: making life-long enemies of the fastest growing segment of our population.
Oooh, bring it on.
As Byron York has pointed out, you have to exclude African Americans from poll results in order to determine how “actual” Americans really feel about things:
But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/black-white-divide-in-obama-popularity-43923897.html
And Republicans wonder why black people won’t vote for them.
This is a side point, but I think I recall that the strategy memos that Miranda pulled off the Senate network were sitting on a file server that the Dem team just had not secured. There was no hacking involved. I know he resigned, and this is not to defend the guy. But I remember thinking at the time that the Dem’s should have been ashamed that there **** wasn’t locked down tighter.
So how exactly do African-Americans think Manuel? You seem to know so much about what is in our heads. Where does the GOP get these obese windbags from that believe they are helping the GOP make a comeback?
i totally agree with williamc. if barack obama had not ran for president, Hillary Clinton would have gotten 98% of the black vote.